This fits in with your concerns about --noscriptlet as well- if one installs a package without using the scriptlet, it should probably be removed and upgraded without it.

I have to admit that I am having some uneasiness about this now. But I think it's due to the fact that the current pacman 2.9.8 sometimes forces users to use -Rd (e.g. http://www.archlinux.org/news/201/) in order to get around pacman bugs. Hopefully with pacman 3, users will only use -Rd for their own reasons (1), not because they need to work around pacman bugs. But I guess, bottom line, is that folks should only be using -Rd if they know what they're doing.


1) I use pacman -Rd with gnome-python-extras because the systemtray support works perfectly without having to install a huge number of gnome deps.

Sorry for the bug spam but making pacman -Sd permanent is a bad idea in my opinion. It could eventually cause breakage on a user's system.

(Oops, replace all -Rd with -Sd in my previous message :P)

Sure it could eventually cause breakage, but using pacman -Sd can cause breakage the very first time you use it too. If someone uses -Sd, they should know what they are doing (assuming, again, that they aren't doing pacman workarounds). And if you're not working around a pacman bug, what's the point of using -Sd when, on your next -Syu, it's going to retrieve all of a package's dependencies?

1) I think -Sd will become less usefull when packages won't depend on packages that are optional dependencies, this will require package maintainers to sanitize depends field in their packages and use optdepends (or whatever it will be called) feature (http://www.archlinux.org/pipermail/pacman-dev/2006-October/000577.html and http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/4845#comment10357).

2) Also same result as permanent -Sd could be reached with improved IgnorePkg (http://bugs.archlinux.org/task/6430).

3)Nevertheless _automatic_ permanent -Sd can be implemented by putting '!' before dependency in /var/lib/pacman/local/<pkgname>/depends, i.e.:
%DEPENDS%
foo
!bar
In this way pacman won't lose track of dependencies while not installing them again and again on -Syu.
But will it be worthy to implement this for few very specific uses when there will be 1st & 2nd (which are useful on their own)?

In my specific case, 1 or 2 would not be very helpful. For example, I choose to pacman -Sd gnome-python-extras because, for my very specialized use case of only wanting egg systemtray support, all of the other gnome deps are not needed. It wouldn't make sense for the gnome deps to become optional, and there would be a lot of packages i would need to add to IgnorePkg to have this work correctly.

Frankly, the easiest thing right now is to pacman -Sd gnome-python-extras each time that I see it updated.

I don't really like the idea of a permanent -Sd either. Btw, how would you override it, if you want dependencies checking back for a package previously installed with -Sd ?
Anyway, this looks like a wrong solution.
The idea of optional dependencies seems to be perfectly adapted to this use case.
But if in this specific case, the optional dependencies are not really optional, then the sanest thing to do here is making a second package imo.

Or maybe a smarter optional deps system could handle this also. For example, some optional deps could be installed by default at the first installation
of the package. And there could also be a way to specify exactly which optional deps to install.

Can we close this as a "Won't implement"? Most of the feedback associated with it has said this is probably not necessary, and a power-user could figure out that they either need to (1) use -Sd to upgrade the package (2) build their own version of the pkg without the 'offending' deps.

As my comment suggested, I'm for the 'won't implement'.